University to place students in temporary housing

Due to an increased demand for on-campus housing, the University expects to place about 120 first-year students and about 75 transfer students in temporary housing, said Joan Carbone, associate vice president of Student Affairs.

First-year students will be placed in closed lounges within residence halls on each campus, she said. The lounge furniture will be removed and a bed, dresser and desk will be provided for each student. They will share the hall bathroom with the floor where they reside.

Each lounge will hold a minimum of three and a maximum of six students, Carbone said.

“We’re going to try to avoid the six, but it’s possible we may have to go to six,” she said. “If we have six, it will be a very large lounge.”

Transfer students will be placed in Old Gibbons on Douglass campus.

“[Old Gibbons] was graduate student housing and we stopped housing there at the end of last year because it needs renovation and we weren’t able to renovate it right now ” she said. “They’re old houses and we don’t really want to house students there right now.”

Students in temporary housing will pay half the price for room and board, and the fee will be prorated on a daily basis, she said. The rebate will be in the form of a credit placed on each student’s account when they are assigned to a regular space.

The University anticipates that all students will be in permanent housing within a couple of months of the start of the semester, Carbone said, but this is not a guarantee. This process will begin once the University determines how many residents do not move into their assigned rooms.

The Rutgers Assignments Office sent out an email on July 26 alerting students contracted to reside on campus that the University relaxed their cancellation policy. From this, Carbone said more than 100 students chose to cancel their contracts, opening up spaces for transfer students.

New student housing on the College Avenue campus should prevent this situation in future years.

The University managed to subside the housing crunch in the past two years by opening 2000 new spaces— The Busch, Engineering, Science and Technology on Busch campus in 2011 and the Livingston Apartments on Livingston campus in 2012, she said.

Yet in the fall of 2010, a lack of on-campus space led the University to house first-year students at the Crowne Plaza in Somerset, she said. The University contracted with Academy Bus to provide those students with a shuttle to campus.

The University has fewer students living in temporary housing this year, so Carbone said placing students in hotels would have been unnecessary.

“The biggest problems we had with the hotels was the distance,” she said. “The students felt extremely isolated, and while the accommodations were very nice, I don’t think the students felt very a part of of the community.”